Studying task allocation decisions of novice agile teams with data from agile project management tools

Abstract

Task allocation decisions are critical for the success of Agile teams yet not well understood. Traditional survey/interview based methods limit the scale and level of details of data collection. As agile project management (APM) tools are increasingly adopted, they offer a mechanism for unobtrusively collecting behavior data to support research. In this paper, we demonstrate the advantage of APM tool based method of studying task allocation decision-making in agile software engineering compared to survey/interview based methods. Through the proposed HASE online APM tool, we conducted a study involving 20 novice Agile teams consisting of 119 undergraduate software engineering students over an 8 week period. Analysis of the collected data provides insight into the effects of novice Agile team members' competence and the difficulty of the tasks assigned on them on their workload variation, their confidence, and the timeliness of completion of these tasks. These findings can be useful in designing situation-aware task allocation decision support systems to serve Agile teams.